Behavior: The American Family: Future Uncertain

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AMERICA'S families are in trouble—trouble so deep and pervasive as to threaten the future of our nation," declared a major report to last week's White House Conference on Children. "Can the family survive?" asks Anthropologist Margaret Mead rhetorically. "Students in rebellion, the young people living in communes, unmarried couples living together call into question the very meaning and structure of the stable family unit as our society has known it." The family, says California Psychologist Richard Parson, "is now often without function. It is no longer necessarily the basic unit in our society."

The data of doom—many familiar, some still startling—consistently seem to support this concern. One in every four U.S. marriages eventually ends in divorce. The rate is rising dramatically for marriages made in the past several years, and in some densely-populated West Coast communities is running as high as 70%. The birth rate has declined from 30.1 births per thousand in 1910 to 17.7 in 1969, and while this is a healthy development in many respects, it implies considerable change in family life and values. Each year, an estimated half-million teen-agers run away from home.

Enormous Crises

The crisis in the family has implications that extend far beyond the walls of the home. "No society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated," warns Dr. Paul Popenoe, founder of the American Institute of Family Relations. Harvard Professor Emeritus Carle Zimmerman has stated the most pessimistic view: "The extinction of faith in the familistic system is identical with the movements in Greece during the century following the Peloponnesian Wars, and in Rome from about A.D. 150. In each case the change in the faith and belief in family systems was associated with rapid adoption of negative reproduction rates and with enormous crises in the very civilizations themselves."

It is not necessary to share this apocalyptic decline-and-fall theory to recognize many interrelated dangers to both society and family. Each of the nation's forces of change and conflict meet within the family. The "counterculture" of the young, the effects of the war, economic stresses and the decay of the cities—all crowd in on the narrow and embattled institution. The question, of course, is not whether the family will "survive," for that is like asking whether man or biology or society will survive. The question is whether it can survive successfully in its present form. All the evidence shows that in order to do so, it needs help.

Precisely that was uppermost in the minds of 4,000 delegates from across the nation who met in Washington last week for the once-in-a-decade Conference on Children. Among the proposals they urged on President Nixon were the establishment of a National Institute for the Family; universal daycare, health and early learning services in which parents would play a major role; the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Family and Children; and an in dependent Office of Child Advocacy. There was also a lavish list of demands—though more modest than the one ten years ago—covering everything from prevention of child injuries to reforming the judiciary system.

Weakened Supports